Facebook Spammers Make $20M, Get $100K Fine 74
jfruh writes "Adscend Media, which has been making up to $20M a year from so-called 'likejacking' spam on Facebook, has reached an agreement with the Attorney General of Washington to stop those activities and pay $100,000 in court costs. Among other nefarious techniques, Adscend would overlay Facebook 'like' buttons with provocative photos to spread links to ads from which Adscend would earn referral fees. Adscend also settled out of court with Facebook for an undisclosed amount."
Bad summary? (Score:4, Informative)
They didn't "make" 20 million. They collected 13 million in 2011, minus operating and labor costs, and earned about 2 million overall. So they were hit with a 5% fine.
Re:Adscend Media wasn't spamming (Score:5, Informative)
It seems like you're wrong. You and at least 3 people with mod points did not RTFA
In January, McKennaâ(TM)s office and Facebook sued Jeremy Bash and Fehzan Ali, the owners of Adscend Media LLC for initiating posts to Facebook pages that appeared to offer visitors an opportunity to view scandalous or provocative content. However, before being able to view the content, a series of required steps lured Facebook users into eventually visiting commercial websites. Other tactics included âoelikejacking,â in which Facebook users were tricked into clicking the âoelikeâ button, inadvertently spreading the sales pitches to friends.
Adscend, hired to promote products, in turn does business with âoeaffiliatesâ who create attention-getting marketing messages. Too often, according to the Attorney Generalâ(TM)s Office, those messages amounted to social media spam. Todayâ(TM)s settlement enjoins Adscend and its affiliates from initiating messages that contain misleading or false headers or those that hide the true identity of the sender
Ascend was spamming and getting paid by affiliates to spam on their behalf.
I really only have six words for Washington AG: Admission of Liability & Disgorgment of Profits
Re:Adscend Media wasn't spamming (Score:4, Informative)
Ascend was spamming and getting paid by affiliates to spam on their behalf.
This shows you don't know how online advertising works. Why would affiliates pay Adscend? This is not how it works. Advertisers pay Adscend and in turn Adscend pays affiliates to promote those advertisers, usually for commissions. They act as kind of broker.
The news piece you pasted clearly says this too, especially the part about Adscend doing business with advertisers and then in turn affiliates.
Knowing the field (but not participating on the dark sides of it), there are many products and ways that are meant to hide the activity from these advertising companies. They exist because the affiliates will get (rightly) banned and no money paid when they are found out of doing shit like this.
There's a whole industry spamming social (Score:5, Informative)
There's a whole industry out there spamming "social". At the top are the advertisers who want results and don't ask too many questions. Below them are the SEO firms, advertising things like "Guaranteed first page listings or your money back". [youtube.com] Below them are the businesses that sell "bulk Likes", "+1"s, and fake reviews.
But that's not the bottom of the swamp. The people generating fake social rankings need services to help them. So there are outfits which sell fake Google, Facebook, and Yelp accounts in bulk. Software companies which sell tools for creating fake accounts in bulk. ("250,000 +1 votes per day on a fast connection" ) Outsourcing firms which create fake accounts. These operations tend not to advertise openly, but can be found on "black hat" SEO forums.
They, in turn, need support services. They need fake IP addresses and fake phone numbers for verification calls. There are services to provide those. You can rent phone numbers in bulk for 20 minutes. Bulk IP addresses, needed for bulk fake account creation, come from proxies, many of which come from malware on compromised machines. This is down at the organized crime level.
See our paper "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" [sitetruth.com] for the gory details.
This all started in late 2010, when Google started feeding "local" social data into web search results. There had been social spamming before that, but it was a minor business. Once Google went "social", social spamming took off. Now, social spamming is mainstream SEO. It's cheaper than running a link farm. It's also safer. There's seldom any retaliation from the search engines for social spamming. Even if they detect a fake social account, they can't tie it back to the source. With link farms, the whole farm can be banned, which can shut down a SEO firm.